Hal Roth Seafaring Trilogy (EBOOK): Three True Stories of Adventure Under Sail

By Hal Roth

Big adventures on the high seas—from one of the greatest seafaring writers of our age

Hal Roth’s vivid, authentic tales of the sea have riveted readers around the world for forty years. Here, in one volume, are three of his classic sea stories, each one a white-knuckled, rail-down voyage into the unknown.

A hard-working San Francisco husband and wife abandon their jobs, their security, and, some would say, their sanity to sail their 35-foot sloop to Japan and back—the long way! Over the next nineteen months, they discover exotic islands, fascinating people, and a whole new way of life.

A few years later these intrepid voyagers decide to try their luck against Cape Horn, but they will need a lot more than luck to survive the vicious storms, violent seas, and perilous shores of the world’s most dangerous stretch of water.

Then nine courageous sailors accept a challenge to do what has never been done before: to race alone, in a small sailboat, around the world—nonstop. Only one will complete the race; seven will be forced to withdraw, and one will simply disappear.

• Language: English
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
• Release date: Oct 5, 2005
• ISBN: 9780071778787

Hal Roth

Hal Roth was born in Cementon, a small manufacturing town in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. After serving with the United States Air Force during the Korean War, he attended Muhlenberg College, Lehigh University, and the University of Maryland. In 1957 he moved to Maryland to pursue a career in public education and later purchased a tree farm in Dorchester County, where he now lives and writes in retirement. He has authored many popular books of Eastern Shore history and folklore.

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Praise for Hal Roth

Roth writes with grace, humor, and poetic insight about the vastness and beauty of the ocean.

—Library Journal

"Roth’s books about his life at sea, including Two on a Big Ocean and Two Against Cape Horn, are universally listed among the most influential sailing books ever published."—SpinSheet

Two on a Big Ocean

A valuable addition to the literature of the sea.

—H. W. Tilman

By all means read all of Hal Roth you can find.

—Practical Sailor

A first-class outing for the armchair adventurer.

—Library Journal

A fine personal account. A unique voyage.—SAIL

A first-rate account of a great adventure.—Yachting

Roth’s Polynesian sequences are the best Pacific Island reporting in years.

—William Hogan, San Francisco Chronicle

"A seaman’s yarn par excellence, and ever so much more."—Don Greame Kelly, Oceans

Two Against Cape Horn

A wonderful book.—Eric Hiscock

A great story and a great accomplishment. It left me dumbfounded. [The voyage] is almost impossible for the imagination to grasp.—Irving Johnson

An extraordinary book.—William F. Buckley, Jr.

Absorbing reading. Roth has managed to escape the confines of a pure sea story.—Ernest K. Gann

Roth can charm you out of your armchair.—Kirkus

Enthralling … Roth makes it clear why sailors risk the dangerous Horn passage: for the sailor it is the equivalent of Everest to the mountaineer.

—John Barkham Reviews

This exciting book is a celebration of survival against all odds.—Book of the Month Club

Will stir your blood.—Joe Brown, San Diego Union

It becomes impossible for the reader to put the book down.—Miles Smeeton

Stands out among many great tales.—SAIL

The Horn. Shipwreck. Adventure at the end of the earth. Roth at his best and cruising at its limits. Read it.—Cruising World

This book is a classic.—Practical Sailor

"A nautical saga so tense and exciting as to make the Whisper’s eventual rounding of the Horn almost an anticlimax."—Publishers Weekly

The Longest Race

As a tale of high adventure of a kind which rarely happens and usually few survive, Hal Roth’s account of the race is as good as any nautical yarn ever written.

—Alan Cameron Reviews

Far beyond the other books that were rather superficial, and had not got their facts right.—Robin Knox-Johnston

An epic in the annals of sailing [and] high adventure.

—Herb McCormick, Cruising World

Only a superb seaman who is also a fine writer could weave a narrative as evocative and seamless.

—John Rousmaniere, Dolphin Book Club

Proof indeed that truth can be stranger—and more rewarding—than fiction.—Noland Norgaard, Club Ties

THE HAL ROTH

SEAFARING TRILOGY

Three True Stories of Adventure Under Sail

Books by Hal Roth

Pathway in the Sky Two on a Big Ocean After 50,000 Miles Two Against Cape Horn The Longest Race Always a Distant Anchorage Chasing the Long Rainbow Chasing the Wind We Followed Odysseus How To Sail Around the World

THE HAL ROTH

SEAFARING TRILOGY

Three True Stories of Adventure Under Sail

TWO ON A BIG OCEAN | TWO AGAINST CAPE HORN | THE LONGEST RACE

HAL ROTH

Copyright © 2005 by Hal Roth. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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Two on a Big Ocean first published in 1972 by Macmillan. Maps by John Armstrong.

Two Against Cape Horn first published in 1978 by W. W. Norton. Maps by Sam F. Manning.

An earlier version of The Longest Race was published by W. W. Norton in 1983. The manuscript was revised and new material added in 2005.

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Two on a Big Ocean

HAL ROTH

Two on a Big Ocean

The story of the first circumnavigation of the Pacific basin in a small sailing ship

Maps by John Armstrong

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Joe Brown the editor of Oceans, Hans Strepp of Die Yacht, Bill Robinson of Yachting, Gerry Kidd of Pacific Yachting, and Bernard Hayman of Yachting World for their kind permission to use some of the material which appeared originally in these magazines. The Gilbert Island song is from We Chose The Islands by Arthur Grimble, New York, William Morrow, 1952, and is used by permission.

This book is dedicated to Bobby Uriburu, the veteran sailor from Argentina, whose constant encouragement, assistance, common sense, and good humor might well be copied by men everywhere.

CONTENTS

1   An Idea

2   The Long Crossing

3   So Lofty and Green

4   The People of the Sea

5   Every body’s Paradise

6   Where Are the Cooks?

7   The Smallest Island

8   The Heart of Polynesia

9   Twice Adopted

10   The Back Door to Yesterday

11   Close to Shipwreck

12   The Porpoise Is Dead, the Whale Is Sunk

13   A Large Outrigger Has Been Sighted

14   Where Are You, Magellan?

15   A Sail in Japan

16   Are the Aleutians Cold?

17   Gales, Totems, and Eagles

Appendix: A Few Notes on Whisper

Notes

Even in a little thing

(A leaf, a child’s hand, a star’s flicker)

I shall find a song worth singing

If my eyes are wide, and sleep not.

Even in a laughable thing

(Oh hark! The children are laughing!)

There is that which fills the heart to overflowing,

And makes dreams wistful.

Small is the life of a man

(Not too sad, not too happy):

I shall find my songs in a man’s small life.

                               Behold them soaring!

Very low on earth are the frigate-birds hatched,

Yet they soar as high as the sun.

—SONG FROM THE GILBERT ISLANDS

1 / An Idea

AS WITH MOST GRAND SCHEMES OUR PLAN WAS SIMPLE. We wanted to sail a small yacht from our home in San Francisco to Japan via the islands of the South Pacific, and then to return to the United States on the great circle northern route by way of the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and finally the Queen Charlotte Islands on the west coast of Canada. The proposal called for 19,000 miles of sailing on a roughly oval-shaped course that followed the sweep of the major surface currents of the Pacific. During the nineteen-month trip we would call at some seventy-five ports and sail in both warm and cold waters. In the South Pacific our biggest hazard would be coral reefs. In the North Pacific our difficulty would be fog.

We were two. Margaret and I decided after examining the records of many small-yacht trips that crew problems were often more severe than the trips themselves. We would man the ship ourselves, although we realized that meant watch and watch in turn, not so easy sometimes, especially when the going was difficult. However, we weren’t worried about the troublesome moments. What we thought of were lovely anchorages in turquoise lagoons, weeks of splendid sailing with the warm trade winds behind us, getting to know such places as Samoa, Moorea, Rarotonga, Kusaie … and the fun of meeting Polynesians and Micronesians. I was anxious to hear Tahitian music at first hand. Margaret was keen to see a coral atoll. Japan and the northern islands were unknown mysteries.

We planned to stay entirely in the Pacific and to begin with French Polynesia, the Cook Islands, and Samoa. Then we would shape our course to the northwest and sail to the Ellice, Gilbert, and Eastern Caroline islands, before stopping at Guam and crossing the Philippine Sea on the way to Japan.

It all seemed a long way and a big undertaking. Could we do it?

I learned long ago that travel is more worthwhile if you spend a little time reading about where you are going. There was certainly no lack of writing about most of our goals in the Pacific. The shelves in the libraries bulged with reports of exploration, memoirs of English and French navigators, dusty histories, reminiscences of early travelers, surveys of modern governments, and various long-haired studies. The books about Japan and the Far East often filled a whole room—even in small libraries.

However, when we tried to find out something about the Ellice and Gilbert islands the librarians shook their heads.

Not much on those places, they said. Hardly anyone goes there. No steamship or air service. In fact the Ellice and Gilbert islands are not even on most maps.

Just the islands for me, said Margaret eagerly. I want to discover some new places. I want to sing and dance with strange people. I want to sit in the kitchens of the women and see how they cook. I want to find out how their clothes are made and I would like to look at their houses. But I guess the only way we can visit such forgotten islands is in our own ship.

Our own ship! Our own ship! The phrase sounded nice, but it was only talk. At that time we didn’t own a ship or even know what to buy, though we had been getting plenty of ideas from the splendid shelf of sailing books we had found in the library. More suggestions came from yachting magazines. But most of the advice was from our acquaintances on the docks of Sausalito, a small community just north of the Golden Gate Bridge inside San Francisco Bay.

What kind of a ship shall I get? I asked my expert sailing friends.

A ketch with a powerful engine, said one.

By all means buy a schooner, said another. It’s the traditional ship of America and the best for going anywhere.

A cutter is the only yacht to have, said a third. The two headsail rig is easy to handle and …

Ralph Holloway, my neighbor in Sausalito, owned a trim blue-and-white gaff yawl. It’s just the sail plan you need, he said enthusiastically, unrolling the blueprints on his living-room floor. Everybody knows that a gaff rig is the best for offshore work. A yawl sail plan is perfect.

Four answers to the same question. I should have known better, but like a fool I held out my burned hand toward the flame.

What is the best material for a ship? I asked.

Wood is the only thing for small ships, said Bill Hauselt, who owned a ten-ton schooner and who spoke with authority. You can always fix wood yourself and the repairs are simple and quick.

Nipper Riddell, a veteran of a long Pacific cruise, had other ideas. Bah! Wood is the worst choice you can make for a cruising yacht, he said menacingly. "Forget wood. It’s only a homestead for worms. Get yourself a good steel ship. You want strength in case you hit anything. Steel is best."

I mentioned Nipper’s suggestion to Bob Van Blaricom, an expert sailor who was a civil engineer.

Steel! Wood! Are you mad? said Bob. Do you want to spend the rest of your life replacing rotten planks and soft frames? Or scraping rust and painting steel? Forget woodies and tin boats. Get with the times. Buy a fiberglass ship. Plastic is the best choice these days.

My head was spinning from all these opinions, each of which seemed to go off on a different point of the compass. Only one thing was certain. Small sailing-ship owners were an outspoken, fiercely independent lot who delighted in expressing forceful, earnestly argued views.

The yacht brokers had more ideas. In fact once they started talking they never stopped. They sounded like violin players entranced by the sound of their own fiddling. The brokers never asked us what we wanted; they only tried to sell us what they wanted. They kept telling us what we should have. The brokers asked nosy questions about our finances and suggested schemes for buying harbor-type, cocktail-hour yachts that would have had us in debt forever. Margaret and I fled in horror.

We began to read newspaper advertisements and to tramp the San Francisco Bay docks seeking FOR SALE signs. We shopped diligently for months and inspected several dozen yachts. A ship we could afford was generally too small, too old, in bad condition, or perhaps all three. The cost of big, handsome yachts was beyond us. One ship had a splendid hull but we didn’t like the interior. A Hong Kong-built cutter seemed a good choice until an expert told us the frames and deck beams were too light for offshore cruising. We were shown a forty-two-foot cutter named Helaine that had been constructed by a famous Alameda shipyard. We looked, we liked it, we hesitated … and a friend bought it.

We drove to the Pacific Northwest to see what yachts were for sale. One Sunday morning in October at the Shilshole Bay Marina in Seattle we saw a sleek black-hulled sloop about to go out for a race. The yacht seemed much larger than her thirty-five feet. We liked the ship right away but sighed at the probable cost of a fiberglass hull.

The craft turned out to be a Spencer 35, a design with a good racing record that was built in Canada, just across the border. We traveled to Vancouver and looked up the tiny boat works on Mitchell Island, where we met the builder and later the naval architect, John Brandlmayr. The price was more than we had planned, but we were thrilled at the prospect of a sleek new yacht beautifully finished in teak below decks. I outlined the Pacific trip proposal to Brandlmayr and he thought the ship could do it. We had barely enough money, so I agreed to do a little of the interior finishing and to shop for the Diesel engine, rigging fittings, ground tackle, and the sails myself.

We decided on the name Whisper for our new ship. The builder started construction in November 1965, and she was launched the following February. We spent March fitting her out and installing a Hasler wind vane automatic steering gear which we hoped would reduce tedious watches. In April we sailed Whisper south to San Francisco, covering the 1,000 miles in eleven days.

We soon learned that a new ship needs many modifications, refinements, and a continuing supply of equipment. We threw out an expensive Diesel cooking and heating stove because the depth of the ship made a proper draft impossible. The ship lacked conventional bilge drainage, so we ran a hose from the chain locker to the engine bilge. The floor of the head compartment had no drainage and had to be rebuilt. We put the hand bilge pump in three places before it found a permanent home. We installed larger outlet pipes and valves in the self-draining cockpit. We had trouble with deck leaks around the chain plates and in the after section of the forepeak. A friend, Doug Duane, a magician with metal, made us a dozen special stainless-steel fittings, including a fifteen-gallon kerosene tank that we needed to hold the fuel for lamps, a new cooking stove, and a cabin heater from England.

Margaret and I both kept our regular jobs, but we spent every spare hour of 1966 working on Whisper. Our problems fell into two classes:

(1) Instead of stockpiling money for the trip we found we were spending large sums outfitting the ship ($55 to Paris for charts of French Polynesia, $14 for two mushroom ventilators, $9 for fire-extinguisher refills, $ 150 for a spare sextant, etc.).

(2) For every job we scratched off our project list we found two more to do. For example, on April 30 I had a list with thirty-eight projects (drill locker ventilation holes, improve cockpit locker drainage, install windlass spring, make dinghy chocks, and so forth). That day I completed four jobs but found six new ones, so the list increased to forty!

The following March we began to lay in stores. One evening at dusk a driver from a wholesale grocer unloaded most of his truck on the dock. We almost fainted when we saw the mountain of canned goods (Opening a grocery? inquired a man walking his dog). However, little by little we tucked away the thirty cases of canned meats, vegetables, and fruits, a sack of rice, long skinny boxes of spaghetti, and giant cans of onion flakes, instant potatoes, and dried eggs. Fang, the ship’s cat, was mystified by all the containers, and while we were putting the stores away she liked to hide behind the boxes and to jump among the cans.

By now we had both given up our jobs and were living and working full time on Whisper. There was so much to do that even day and night weren’t long enough. We constructed shelves underneath the cockpit and strapped in such items as eight gallons of bottom paint, varnish, fiberglassing chemicals, and various solvents and sealants. We tucked away a dozen lamp chimneys, extra winch handles, spares for the Primus stoves, and a large box of engine parts. We slipped 130 charts beneath the forepeak bunks, which began to rise alarmingly. Doctors whom we knew loaded us down with enough drugs to start a pharmacy.

I don’t approve of your trip particularly, said Dr. Hank Turkell, the Coroner of San Francisco, who owned a nearby motor-sailer, but if you’re really going you had better take these antibiotics along, he said, generously handing me a small box.

A dentist, Jerry Williams, who had the ship next to us obligingly fitted out a kit for emergency tooth fillings.

We hired an expert to adjust the compass.

We had both shorts and swimming suits for the tropics, and heavy sweaters, thermal underwear, sea boots, and oilskins for the North Pacific. We had light bulbs, nose drops, Stillson wrenches, birthday candles, metric taps, ukulele strings …

We had thousands of items on board, so many that Margaret was obliged to keep lists in order to find things. For foodstuffs she kept one notebook with locations and a second that listed the quantity. We got visas in our passports for the countries we planned to visit. We went to the doctor for various traveler’s injections and booster shots. It seemed that we were working twice as hard and twice as long as we did when we had regular jobs.

But sometimes we stopped work to go sailing, which after all was what the ship was for. San Francisco is a lovely place to sail, for the winds are good and the seas slight. At dawn the sky above the bay was often a delicate garden of daffodil yellow and wild rose. In the afternoon, tongues of cottony white fog would slip in from the Pacific and gently drift past the massive towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. At dusk the lights of San Francisco spun a web of silver that floated above the strong, silent water. In our little ship we would glide along and marvel at it all.

The word had gotten around that we were soon to leave on a long trip. The number of curious visitors on weekends became a problem. Although we had many jobs we were glad to see people and to explain the working of the automatic wind vane steering gear which was a novelty. However, on some Sundays twenty-five or thirty people would appear, some expecting to be fed, given drinks, and generally entertained. Hardly anyone took off his shoes, and by Sunday night the decks and cabin sole would be black with tracked-on dirt.

Sometimes we solved the weekend problem by slipping out for a sail and anchoring in a cove somewhere, often with our friends, Bob and Jane Van Blaricom, who helped us immensely. They had a new baby, Anne, who Bob carried on board in a basket. Bob and Jane had purchased a forty-foot cutter in England and had sailed it across the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal, and up to San Francisco, where they had sold it at a big profit.

And hated ourselves ever since, said Bob wistfully, wishing that he still owned Armorel. "Cruising in small boats is the real life. We certainly wish we were going with you. What fools we were to sell Armorel."

Some of our friends think us quite adventurous and brave, I said. Others think us quite mad. One thing is certain. We’ll be entirely on our own when we’re out there. We’ll have to be self-sufficient and to look out for ourselves. Of course the first question most people ask when they hear about the trip is: ‘How powerful is your radio transmitter?’ I tell them that we have no transmitter and that even if we did there would be no one to call far out in the Pacific, certainly no U.S. Coast Guard. Many people profess to like boating but they have a genuine fear of the sea—or maybe it’s a fear of the unknown. I don’t wish to sound cocky, but I am supremely confident.

You won’t have any problems at all, replied Bob. The biggest problem for adventurers is to get away from home. The world is full of talkers and dreamers. Not many people do anything.

Neither Margaret nor I had ever visited the South Pacific or the Far East. Although we had sailed a little in the West Indies, in Greece, in Scotland, and up and down the west coast of the United States, we had never undertaken a major ocean crossing by ourselves. There was much talk about the Pacific being too large for a small yacht. We would have to find out. …

We were ready to go. We had a good ship, hopefully were well prepared, and had an exciting itinerary.

The table was set. The meal was in front of us.

2 / The Long Crossing

ON OUR TWELFTH DAY AT SEA, MAY 15, WE WERE HALFway between California and the Marquesas, the northernmost islands of French Polynesia. We had forgotten about land. Civilization seemed remote and unbelievable. Our position that day was 15° 15’ north of the equator and 125° west of Greenwich. San Francisco was 1,560 miles to the north. Hilo, Hawaii, lay 1,740 miles in a direction a little north of west, and my chart showed that El Salvador, in Central America, was 2,340 miles to the east.

When I stood in the companionway and looked around I saw only the ocean, the sky, and the trade wind clouds—small rabbit tails of cotton that lay stacked overhead like puffs from a giant pipe. We had seen no ships since leaving California, and we were emphatically alone—alone in a world of blue. A feathery turquoise glowed in the sky; around me as I turned I could see a hard rim of ink-bottle blue where the sky stopped and the sea began. The etched line of the horizon was firm and definitive and it almost seemed to enclose a private world. It was a delight to be by ourselves, and how free we were! Our lives lay in our hands alone—no one knew where we were—and the independence was a good feeling. I felt exuberant and reassured somehow. I knew that I was in charge of the ship and what we did, but I also had the notion that I was in control of the sea that I could see around me—a foolish idea, I suppose, for it is manifest that the sea knows no master. Yet as long as we paid proper respect to the might of the ocean I felt sure that our tiny ship would be safe.

On that sun-drenched day Whisper flew along with the strong northeast trade wind blowing hard on her port quarter. We had eased the mainsail to starboard so the wind blew directly against the big sail, which we balanced with a jib held out to port on a long pole set at right angles to the following wind. In general we had found the northeast trades stronger than we had reckoned. The arrows on the Pilot charts indicated winds of Force 4, eleven to sixteen knots, but we often experienced Force 6, twenty-two to twenty-seven knots, and sometimes more. However, the winds were fair and behind us.

The trade wind sailing was glorious. Whisper seemed totally alive and as responsive as a lady in love. How we rushed along! With the sails full and straining we would ride up on a big swell and whoosh forward as a white-topped crest raced past. The air was fresh and you took in great lungfuls of the clean stuff. The sun felt hot on my bare shoulders, and Margaret and I often sat on the side decks and let our feet hang over the edge into the 75° water. When I looked aloft the sun glinted on the warm brown of the spruce mast and sparkled on bits of the rigging. Whisper rolled steadily from side to side, and I looked up through half-closed eyes to see the white sails dancing beneath the blue of the sky. Was the ship moving and the sky steady or was it the other way? The white embraced the blue and waltzed around and around. The white pirouetted. The blue bowed. It was a dream; it was heaven!

We steered Whisper largely with an automatic mechanism, a Hasler wind vane steering gear. The device was a valuable crewman who was always alert and working, never grumbled, never got hungry, and was particularly good on long night watches. As time went on we found the steering gear more and more useful. It gave Margaret and me time to navigate, do odd jobs, read, and get plenty of sleep. Steering hour after hour at sea is a bore; we had plenty of other things to do.

The wind vane gear was similar to the devices used to steer model yachts—the trim little ships I remember so well in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park on Sunday afternoons. You put the model ship on the course you wanted and trimmed the sails for the wind. Then if the ship changed direction for any reason when sailing across the pond a small wind blade near the stern turned and its corrective movements were linked to the rudder, which put the ship back on its proper course. On a model yacht the wind blade was coupled directly to the rudder, but on a larger ship the force of the wind blade was not strong enough to move the tiller. On Whisper we had a clever mechanism invented by Blondie Hasler, the English sailing expert, which mechanically amplified the movements of a wind blade and exerted a powerful steering force on the tiller.

Our automatic steering gear meant we were relieved of the slavery of steering most of the time. We had to know what the wind was doing, of course, and adjust the setting of the steering vane from time to time, but sometimes we didn’t touch it for hours or days. Without a hand on the tiller we could keep a better lookout because you could stand up and move around. In the neighborhood of ships it was easier to keep track of steamers, and along a coastline the person on watch could navigate instead of going cross-eyed watching the compass. Around land or near shipping lanes where there was a risk of collision, Margaret and I kept watches twenty-four hours a day, generally four hours on and four hours off. But when we were a thousand miles from shore and far from shipping lanes I eased the rigid watch schedule. At night one of us would sleep deeply while the other read or dozed below, going on deck every twenty or thirty minutes for a look around. You got used to the creaking of the ship and the water gurgling along the hull, and like a mother with a new baby you were instantly alerted by any unusual sound.

There was a different dimension to nighttime sailing. The log for May 9, read:

2045. Tearing along with the sails unchanged for over 24 hours. Margaret and the cat sound asleep. The night is so black that only after I look around for a few minutes do my eyes become aware of faint stars through a thin layer of cloud. The wind has picked up to 20 knots or so. Although we’re only traveling at something like six miles an hour, the illusion of speed is tremendous; we hurtle along through the black night like an express train in a tunnel. Rivers of phosphorescence stream from the stern and our wake is a luminous, glowing ribbon of milky froth that is pure magic. The wind has veered a trifle and I have lowered our course to put us back on 175°M. The barometer has been reading low and unchanged for over two weeks and I am sure it is broken. Better forget about it. No one can predict weather anyway.

When the winds blew stronger our little ship churned through the seas. On one day our sleek hull knifed through 151 miles in twenty-four hours, a record run for us and good time for a ship only twenty-five feet on the waterline. But we paid for the speed by rolling heavily. With winds from astern we had trimmed the sails for running, and with little fore and aft canvas effectively set, Whisper rolled a good deal. The faster we sailed the more we rolled. We had to hold on grimly when below, and on deck we crawled around. The endurance of the crew became the limiting factor. We got exhausted. The ordinary acts of living became perilous adventures. It was time to slow down.

We reduced the area of the mainsail by rolling up half a dozen turns around the main boom. We replaced the jib with one only 75 percent as big. With the drive of less horsepower we slowed from six knots to five knots or a little less. The small reduction in speed caused a big reduction in the violent motion; no longer were we dolls controlled by a palsied puppeteer, but human beings on a peaceful trip.

A few days later the wind increased to Force 7, twenty-eight to thirty-three knots, a moderate gale, and though it was behind us we found the sea conditions too rough for us to continue. We hove to—that is, we headed into the wind and arranged the sails and tiller so the ship almost stopped. I went on deck a little after midnight, hauled down the working jib, and hanked on the storm jib. However, Whisper lay so smoothly under the triple reefed mainsail alone that I left her without any headsail. As I turned to go below I looked around. The clouds were gone and overhead the world was all sky and stars. Deep in the darkness of the southern sky I saw a small cluster of stars. It was a new constellation, the Southern Cross, one I had never seen before. I was enthralled. I thumbed through a star chart and added Acrux, Gacrux, Hadar, and Rigil Kent to my friends up there.

The next morning we dropped the mainsail, hoisted the storm jib, and bent on and raised the trysail, a small boomless storm sail used in place of the mainsail in bad weather. We squared away before the northeast wind again, and with only the two small scraps of sails flying we logged runs of 107 and 108 miles during the next forty-eight hours. The wind then moderated to fifteen knots and we hoisted our regular canvas.

Mariners, especially sailing people, plan their routes and try to minimize adverse currents and headwinds by studying Pilot charts. These special weather maps cover the world in various sheets and are prepared for each month or every other month. The information is based on thousands and thousands of observations and dates back to the pioneering work of Matthew Fontaine Maury, a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, who provided nineteenth century sailing-ship masters with special logbooks in which to record the weather they found. On Pilot charts every ten-degree square of latitude and longitude is broken into four smaller squares, each with a blue wind quadrant that tells the percentage of time and force the wind has been observed to blow from a certain direction. You can read about the weather generally and inspect diagrams that detail barometric pressure and the chances of gales. The Pilot charts show the air temperature in dotted red, magnetic variation in gray, ocean currents in small blue arrows, storm tracks in solid red, fog in dotted blue, and the type and limits of ice in patterned red lines.

On our passage to French Polynesia we were concerned with the trade winds and doldrums. A straight-line course between San Francisco and the Marquesas measured about 3,000 miles. We picked up the northeast trades roughly 250 miles south of the United States-Mexican border when we were an equal distance west of the mainland. According to the Pilot chart for May, we could expect to stay in the fair northeast trades to about 8° N. and 132° W., or some 1,140 miles. But after passing through the doldrums and into the southeast trades we would have wind forward of the beam. We could improve this prospect by keeping farther east in the northeast trades so that when we finally struck the southeast trades we would have a fair wind. We also wished to cross from one trade wind belt to the other through an area where the doldrums, the place of fickle winds and prolonged calms, were narrow. Further complications were the equatorial surface currents. After studying the Pilot charts and reading accounts of other voyages, we headed for 125° W. and 10° N., a reasonable compromise that made our route some 200 miles longer but augured better winds.

Time! shouted Margaret from on deck. I was below with a second-setting watch in my hand. I wrote down 09:28:57.

I read 42° 41’, called Margaret. I noted the angle in the workbook and repeated it aloud. Margaret handed down the sextant and I stowed it away in its box.

We navigated in turn. I would find our position one day. Margaret would do it the next. This way both of us kept in practice, and if one of us were sick or busy, the other could carry on. It was exciting to cross one position line with a second and to find where we were to within a mile or two. Sometimes I would be so anxious for the final cross that my hands would shake with excitement.

I think the difficulties of celestial navigation are highly overrated. We learned it ourselves, mainly from Eric Hiscock’s Voyaging Under Sail. You have an almanac—issued yearly—which gives the position of each navigational body for every second of time for each day. You measure the angle between the horizon and a heavenly body—generally the sun—with an angle-measuring device called a sextant. You make three slight corrections to the sextant angle, extract two figures from the almanac, and enter a second book—H.O. 249—from which in effect you take out half of your position. Observations of two heavenly bodies at the same time or of one heavenly body at different hours of the day give you two position lines and a precise fix.

Margaret and I generally made a sun sight between 0900 and 1000 and a second around noon. Or if the moon was up and we could find it we used it. (My favorite sights were simultaneous observations of the sun and moon.) Sometimes we shot stars, three of which gave a precise position. We found the main difficulty with celestial navigation was not the calculations but the observations. It was important to see the horizon sharply at the instant of measurement when no intervening waves were in the way. You waited until the ship lifted on a wave, the horizon was clear, and then turned the micrometer screw on the sextant until the reflected sun just met the horizon. At this instant you noted the exact time. Of course when the weather was rough and the ship was rolling heavily it was hard to get a good sight, but, like everything else on earth, practice was the answer.

In the old days a sailing-ship master had trouble knowing his exact position because he lacked the precise time needed to find his longitude. Chronometers helped greatly, but the invention of radio solved the problem. On Whisper we tuned our Zenith transistor radio to WWV and WWVH, powerful U.S. stations that broadcast special time signals. In the Western Pacific we got a time signal sent out before news broadcasts from Radio Australia. Later we got time checks from Guam and Tokyo before returning to the range of U.S. stations. On no day during our nineteen-month trip did we fail to receive time signals on one of our two receivers. In addition we carried two rated timepieces.

Shortly after we had left California we had had trouble with deck leaks, supposedly an impossibility in a fiberglass yacht. We didn’t mind a few drops of water, but a steady drip from the shelves along both sides of the forepeak soon turned the books, bedding, and a hundred other things into a soggy mess. South of San Francisco we had hit contrary winds which had resulted in a lot of water over the foredeck. So much water had gotten below that I began to fear for the safety of the ship. We had two bilge pumps that drew from beneath the engine compartment, but the rest of the bottom of the hull was partitioned off into tanks and sections without conventional fore and aft drainage beneath them. Water from forward couldn’t drain aft to be pumped out until it collected to the point where it flooded over the cabin floor. We mopped up the water with sponges and buckets. I was alarmed (Would the leaks get worse?) and put back into Southern California from several hundred miles offshore. Once in port Margaret hosed off the wet things and hung them out to dry. I called on experts to help me with the leak.

We pulled off the port toerail and found that the hull-deck joint underneath, though strong, had been fabricated in such a way that water could work down inside the joint and get below through the toerail bolt holes. We sealed the top of the hull-deck joint as best we could, put plenty of bedding compound underneath the toerail, and bolted it back in place. We also caulked a leak in the front hatch coaming.

If you’ll take my advice you’ll seal that front hatch with heavy tape all around the outside, counseled an old sailor. Then she’ll never leak.

We followed his suggestion, filled our water tanks, and headed out to sea determined to carry on. Whisper sailed beautifully with her magnificent hull, but at that moment I had a poisonous opinion of naval architects and yacht builders after a week of expensive, difficult, inconclusive, frustrating, and time-wasting leak-hunting. I formulated a thought I was to recall many times in the months ahead: If only the naval architect and the builder had to sail their creation across an ocean!

Now many days later and far to the south the leaks were largely forgotten. The warm northeast trade wind blew behind us. The sun was hot, all the ports were open, and the decks were dry. The cat slept stretched out under the shade of the dinghy, and I stood on the foredeck dumping buckets of sea water over my head to cool off. All the blankets and heavy clothes and shoes had been tucked away. We slept under one sheet. Our uniforms were sun hats, shorts, and bare feet.

Margaret cooked on a two-burner Primus stove that used kerosene under pressure from a three-gallon tank. We had taken twelve dozen freshly laid eggs (which kept perfectly when coated with Vaseline) and generally had eggs and tea and toast for breakfast. Sometimes we ate cold cereal with milk made from powdered whole milk, which became a creamy, rich liquid when stirred with a little water. We often lunched on soup or bouillon and sandwiches made with tinned meat. We started off with eight loaves of bread, which kept reasonably well for several weeks. Margaret then trimmed off the moldy bits and made toast. When the bread got beyond salvage we heaved the remains over the side and changed to ship’s biscuit.

We always had a hot meal for dinner: spaghetti with tinned meat, salmon or tuna in a white sauce, roast beef and rice, corned beef and cabbage. … We had a large box of fruits and vegetables in the forepeak, and just before we left, a friend, Mabel Rolley, gave us an enormous bag of big, tree-ripened oranges. How we enjoyed those oranges on the long crossing! How many times I blessed Mabel. When the sun beat down and the ship had rolled away your appetite the sweet juicy segments were cool and refreshing and almost seemed to pour energy into your bones.

Margaret’s cooking was first-rate. She would open a can or two, ask me for a few potatoes or carrots from the vegetable bin, rattle around in the galley, and shortly afterward hand me a warm and savory plate of buttered diced beets, fluffy steaming rice, and spicy chicken curry. Or maybe creamed carrots, roast beef braised with wine, and sautéed potatoes. You always find corned beef at sea because it is cheap, keeps well, and is wholesome and solid. But you get tired of it. Margaret was a wizard at disguising corned beef. Sometimes she would dip slices of the meat into beaten egg, roll them in coarse brown flour, and fry them crispy and golden. She made a special chile con carne with corned beef. Sometimes we ate it on crackers together with white-hot mustard and pickles. Her steamed dumplings gave corned beef and cabbage a new dimension.

I saw clever work in the galley. With no refrigeration we couldn’t keep leftovers long, but we hated to waste food. Margaret often stuffed the remains of the evening meal into an omelet the next morning. A little peppery spaghetti and meat did wonders to the eggs. My favorite meal was beef stroganoff made with canned button mushrooms, thick canned cream, and tinned roast beef from Colorado.

The last few paragraphs may give the idea that we dined on starched linen with gold knives and forks after consulting menus chiseled in marble. Hardly! We ate well. Margaret was a wonder with modest ingredients, but there were plenty of days when the weather was bad and we had stew, or macaroni and cheese served in bowls. Then we ate wedged in somewhere, generally with our backs pushed firmly against the corner formed by a bulkhead and a settee and our feet jammed against the opposite settee.

Whisper continued to leak a little forward, which was disappointing after our repair efforts in California. There wasn’t much we could do except to move things out of the way, try to dry them out a little, and to mop up.

One night when we were hurrying along with a strong following wind, a small jib, and a deep reef in the main, there was a terrible crash and bang! bang! I rushed outside to find that the roller reefing gear had slipped somehow and the reefed mainsail had unrolled from the boom. Without the support of the sail, the end of the boom had dropped, and with every roll of the ship the eighteen-foot boom crashed into the dinghy, which was stowed upside down on the coachroof. Already there was a dent in the aluminum skiff, and I felt splinters from the spruce boom under my bare feet as I stood on deck. I raised the boom end with the topping lift and inspected the expensive roller reefing gear with a flashlight. Unintentional unwinding was supposed to have been impossible; clearly the roller reefing gear was faulty, which meant that every time I reefed the mainsail I had to leave the handle in place and lash it to prevent the boom from unrolling. I cursed the makers and the builder who installed such unrepairable junk. Every time I used the roller reefing gear on the trip thereafter—several hundred times—I had to tie the handle in place.

On May 15 the log read:

1500. Very hot as we sail on and on toward the equator. Temperature of 86° in the cabin and we are dressed only in shorts. Three squalls today—the first at 0500—and a lovely refreshing shower with each. The rain pelts down and feels like needles at first but the soothing effect is marvelous. Noon position of 9° 44’ N. and 126° 20’ W. We have traveled 1,698 miles from San Francisco. Eiao in the Marquesas is 1,372 miles away. Good star sights of Sirius and Dubhe and the moon at dusk yesterday. Complicated to plot because the star fixes need to be moved for precession before the position line of the moon is drawn. I have never heard this problem discussed. 138 miles noon to noon.

The next day the strong northeast winds fell away as we worked south into the doldrums, the area of calms and variables that I had reckoned would last for 175 miles before we got into the southeast trades. I wondered what was going to happen? Would we be becalmed for weeks and finally run out of food? Whisper’s light weight and easily driven hull were advantages now, and with the full main and a big genoa headsail we glided along on a calm blue sea. Tall banks of cumulus clouds towered into the hot reddish sky around us, and I counted eight rain squalls spaced around the horizon. The clouds were all tints of green, blue, and gray whose shades changed as fast as you turned your head. To describe such a scene was hopeless. While I was wondering how to do it a squall providentially erased my problem in a flood of rain and darkness.

I learned that squalls were short-lived heavy gusts of wind and rain (or snow) that could occur anywhere but appeared more often in the tropics and especially in the doldrums, where the air was particularly hot and moist. During the day you would see a bank of clouds, well worried with slashes of gray, advancing toward you. Sometimes you would realize that a squall was coming when you saw the sea under a low cloud suddenly kicked up into short whitecaps that danced beneath the wind. At night you learned to recognize an unreal quiet before a squall struck. When a squall hit the ship Margaret or I would race up on the foredeck and let the jib halyard fly to lower the headsail to ease the wind pressure on Whisper. Heavy rain would pour down for perhaps ten minutes (a good time for a freshwater shower) and the squall would pass. Then up with the sail again and back on course. Sometimes the squalls were bigger, as I found out on May 16:

Last night at 0300 I heard the wind coming. The ship heeled, the rain started, and I eased off to the west with the wind behind me. But the rain! It began lightly and soon increased. It poured. Then the volume doubled and doubled again! The rain fell so heavily that it blotted out the sails, the ship, the cabin—everything. I began to wonder where I was and what I was doing out in the middle of the Pacific in such a deluge. Then the rain increased again! Were we caught under a waterspout? I couldn’t even see the kerosene cabin light only a few feet away.

The water beat down on my head and back and sloshed on the floor of the cockpit which filled faster than the drains could empty it. Suddenly there was a big crash next to me as the cat’s box filled to the top and tipped off the cockpit seat. I was aware that the rain had eased a little when lightning jerked across the sky, igniting the low clouds with blue fire. I began to count one-one-thousandth, two-one-thousandth, etc., to work out how far the lightning was from the ship by the number of seconds later the accompanying thunder roared, but I had forgotten how to do it and gave up such useless calculations of doom. There was so much thunder that I would have mixed up the various peals anyway.

I was dressed only in shorts and a cotton T-shirt and I got very cold. I finally called to Margaret to pass me an oilskin jacket. I had no idea whether the squall had lasted ten minutes or half an hour. I clicked on a flashlight and wiped the water from my watch. The storm had lasted two hours.

We had good luck getting through the doldrums and began to pick up southeast winds only thirty-six hours after leaving the northeast trades. On the two days in the doldrums we made daily runs of 120 and 97 miles, remarkable times in such an area, but Whisper was at her best in light going.

Sometimes we saw flying fish, silvery bluish creatures eight or ten or twelve inches long that would suddenly appear a few feet out of the water and soar parallel to the waves for perhaps a quarter or half a mile. Once in a while Fang would find one of the fish on deck. She then became a wild animal. Growling hoarsely, she would seize the fish in her mouth and rush off to a secluded corner to work on her victim, first playing with the poor creature until it was a bloody mess before she ate it. For some reason Fang liked to drag the fish into the toilet compartment. She soon had blood and fish scales all over the floor. I couldn’t stand this and banished the cat and her blasted fish to the cockpit. For a while she tried to sneak the fish below, but she gave herself away because she always growled when she had a fish. She finally got the idea: no fish below.

One morning when we were 570 miles from Eiao and below eating breakfast we heard a ship’s whistle alongside. We jumped up to see the U.S.N.S. Richfield, a large gray military vessel with yellow rings painted on her stack. She was the first ship we had seen since California more than three weeks before. The whole crew appeared to be on deck and everyone was waving and smiling. We couldn’t imagine where the ship was going or why she was in such an isolated part of the Pacific. From her heading she seemed outbound from Panama. Her speed was easily two or three times that of our five knots, and as we waved she was already pulling ahead. In a little while she was out of sight and we were alone again. What excitement to see a ship!

On May 24 I got an excellent five-star fix from Arcturus, Spica, Acrux, Canopus, and Sirius. We were now south of the equator and 310 miles from the Marquesas. At the time I knew it was ridiculous, but after I had plotted our position I went on deck and looked for land.

The sea voyage was long, perhaps too long. After three weeks I was impatient for land. The 64,000,000 square miles of the Pacific were too much. I took a pair of scissors and a map of the world and cut out the North Atlantic and laid its pattern over the Pacific. It took four North Atlantics to fill the Pacific. The distance from Ecuador to the Philippines along the equator measured 9,300 miles!

Just as I thought, I said to Margaret when I showed her my paper dolls. The blasted Pacific is endless.

Yet it was beautiful out there, and after a time you learned a rhythm from the sea. The day would break, the sun would rise in the eastern sky, the sun would beat down from overhead, and then the light would fall away to the west and the day was gone. Your life was measured in pulse beats of the sun, ticks on a colossal clock whose pendulum had its pivot among the stars and its weight on the wave tops.

The sea was calm. The sea was stormy. The sea was always there, regular and sure, swelling up and down, massive and huge. You were in its embrace and its arms were strong. Sometimes my breath came in gasps when I felt its throbbing presence so closely. But what am I talking about? The relationship between the sea and a man is the same sort of stuff as between a man and a woman. The best parts of it are unspoken matters of the senses and the guts. You can’t talk about it because no one is skilled enough. The words don’t exist. It is personal and private and if you know it you feel it. If you don’t you don’t. There is no nonsense with mere words. That’s how it was between the might of the sea and me.

Strange birds sometimes circled around and around the ship. We would get out our bird books and the binoculars and spend hours trying to identify them. One morning a beautiful red-billed tropicbird flew around Whisper, perhaps attracted by the white sails. When he got near the cockpit he fluttered his wings and slowed down, almost treading air, so he could have a close look at the peculiar creatures beneath him. He saw two sunburned human beings dressed in bits of cotton cloth and straw hats.

We looked up at the tropicbird and saw a slender white bird about two and a half feet in length, with two extremely long central tail feathers that extended behind him in a graceful arc perhaps eighteen inches long. He had a thick, heavy, orange-reddish bill and a long black patch on each cheek. His wing tips on top were black and his white back had fine crosswise dark lines. He was a powerful flier, and the curious bird stopped in mid-air again and again only a few feet from us. He seemed to say: Just who are you anyway? What are you doing here? It was a thrill to see him so near, a completely wild and uninhibited creature.

Long ago, sailors gave the tropicbird the nickname bosun bird because of the marlinspike—the long feathers—he carried in his tail.

At 0700 on May 25 I figured that we were 167 miles from land. I began to spend more time with the sextant and navigation books, and we made a big effort to steer a good course. I had no cause to doubt our position, but I was nervous nevertheless, since the distance from California to the Marquesas was more than 3,000 miles. What if I had made a constant error in navigation? To ease my mind I calculated Whisper’s position with H.O. 211, an alternate scheme of celestial navigation. I checked the time with the radio anew and took separate observations with the sextant. Our position appeared to be accurate.

That afternoon I replaced a chafed line from the steering vane to the tiller, but while I was tucking an eye splice in the 3/8″ line I kept peering ahead. We had seen a few land birds and the excitement at being close began to grow.

O.K., mighty navigator, Margaret shouted a few hours later. Wake up. It’s star time.

I rubbed my eyes, got up from the starboard berth, grabbed the sextant, and climbed sleepily on deck. The sun was down in the west, and the sky was just dark enough to see the first stars. The warm southeast wind blew about fifteen knots and we galloped along at between five and six knots under the full main and the working jib.

I’ve got Canopus, Sirius, and Arcturus in sight, said Margaret. And Venus and Mars. You’d better hurry before the clouds cover them.

I braced myself on deck and shot sights of the stars and planets while Margaret used a small flashlight to read the watch and to write down the time and sextant angles. The 1900 star fix put us sixty-two miles east-northeast of Hatutu; the position lines from Mars and Venus crossed at a point fifty-five miles from land, or seven miles closer. Eiao, our destination, was a few miles farther. The wind had eased a little, and I thought we wouldn’t see the islands until the next day.

One thing in our favor was that the land

Reviews for Hal Roth Seafaring Trilogy (EBOOK)

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Three good solid chunks of armchair sailing.Two on a big ocean and Two against Cape Horn may sound like Enid Blyton titles, but they're actually first-hand accounts of long cruises Hal Roth and his wife made on their 35-foot sloop Whisper — around the South and North Pacific in 1967-68; through the islands of southern Chile and around Cape Horn a few years later. Roth provides a very well-balanced mixture of sailing stuff and more general travel writing about the people they meet and the places they visit. Neither aspect displays sensationally good writing, but equally there's nothing really disagreeable or dull. It will keep you entertained, and might inspire you with a desire to see the places for yourself. However, what he tells us about the islands and straits around Cape Horn won't do anything to change the idea you already had that these are bad places to be in a big, powerful motor ship, and absolutely crazy places to take a small sailing boat. The third book in this collection is The longest race, an account of the notorious 1968-69 non-stop singlehanded round-the-world race sponsored by the Sunday Times. The race had plenty of drama, but, perhaps inevitably as nothing like this had ever been run before, was an organisational disaster. Nine solo yachtsmen started: six of them had to withdraw at various stages due to ill-health, storm damage or mechanical failure; another, who should never have been allowed to start, went mad and killed himself; the amazingly hairy and delightfully eccentric Bernard Moitessier enjoyed himself so much finding inner harmony on the Southern Ocean that he didn't want to return to Europe (and his wife and kids...), so he left the race shortly before the finish, did an additional half-circuit of the globe and ended up in Tahiti; the reassuringly English (but still pretty hairy) Robin Knox-Johnston was thus the only one who actually got back to Plymouth and took the prize. This race was big news when I was a child, and I remember reading Knox-Johnston's book at the time, although the details now escape me. Roth's book was written more than thirty years after the event and draws very heavily on the first-hand accounts of the participants, which he quotes and paraphrases extensively. As an experienced yachtsman who took part in later, better-organised solo races, and knew quite a few of the sailors involved (including Knox-Johnston and Moitessier) he is able to add a bit of perspective and explanation here and there, and the story he has to tell is a gripping one, but really the book is a bit of a journalistic pot-boiler.